I admire the work of Valeria Maltoni. Over the years, we’ve shared our individual ideas and vision for discovering, monitoring, and measuring relevant conversations in order to effectively chart the corporate landscape and identify opportunities for mutually beneficial engagement and learning. We’ve decided to collaborate to weave our experiences and advice into one post that we hope helps you unravel the confusion stemming from value over hype when evaluating Social Media as a channel for presenting, interacting, and observing.

On the heels of my recent post, “Is Social Media Recession Proof,” Forrester released new details associated with its latest research survey that links business buyers and their process of researching solutions to Social Media.

Forrester interviewed business buyers to learn about their social activity, in this case, more than 1,200 technology buyers in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. with 100 employees or more in seven major industries.

Earlier this month, I enjoyed an invigorating conversation over dinner with Walt Mossberg. Friends surrounded us, but for the majority of the evening, we were immersed in a passionate discussion that dismantled and rebuilt the potential future of media and communications.

It took me several weeks to deconstruct the essence and impact of our dialogue in order to share the experience with you.

Fueled by a combination of popularity, curiosity, necessity, strategy, and trendiness, marketers are embracing a new recipe that injects a proactive, social approach to outbound communications and engagement – with or without all of the answers before they jump in. This approach, while courageous, has required faith, conviction, and champions who didn’t necessarily have access to metrics and case studies at the SMB and enterprise level. Many of the most and also least effective campaigns were implemented as a way of learning. As we all know, some Social Media campaigns have excelled while others have publicly flopped and contributed to the cynicism and fear of embracing a transparent form of open and public dialogue.

Not to be outdone by the news of Twitter’s astronomical growth, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that the popular social network has hit a noteworthy milestone, the welcoming of their 200 millionth user.

To celebrate the moment, Zuckerberg commented, “When we built Facebook in 2004, our goal was to create a richer, faster way for people to share information about what was happening around them. We thought that giving people better tools to communicate would help them better understand the world, which would then give them even greater power to change the world.”

The Social Web is maturing at a blurring pace, packing thousands of years of behavioral and social evolution into the span of ten years or less. Social Media has amplified our individual voices and introduced an infrastructure that connects us contextually across a myriad of social networks. We’re conditioned to participate and engage genuinely and transparently in order to foster meaningful conversations and ultimately relationships.

Twitter continues to defy all those who question its relevance. Exploding from 6 million visitors at the beginning of the year, ComScore released its latest numbers that portray an almost vertical ascent through the end of February 2009, hitting an astonishing 10 million worldwide.

Last year, Stowe Boyd and I, in development with Christopher Peri, introducedMicroPR, an online service for Twitter that connects reporters, bloggers, event organizers, authors, among others, to PR representatives when they need help sourcing content or connecting with experts in Twitter time. To date, MicroPR is followed by over 5,000 communications and marketing professionals.

MicroPR extends a tweet beyond the existing followers of the person asking for help to include those following the decicated PR channel. It amplifies the Tweet to improve the quality of responses.

My good friend, Frank Gruber is one of the hardest working bloggers and new media professionals I know. By day, he’s a product strategist for AOL in the social networking group. His focus is on lifestreaming products, including AIM, Bebo and SocialThing. Frank Gruber is also a well known blogger focused on sharing his Web product expertise and analysis on Web 2.0, social media and emerging technologies in articles and videos online.

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ABOUT ME

Brian Solis is a digital analyst, anthropologist, and also a futurist. In his work at Altimeter Group, Solis studies the effects of disruptive technology on business and society. He is an avid keynote speaker and award-winning author who is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders in digital transformation.

His most recent book, What's the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences (WTF), explores the landscape of connected consumerism and how business and customer relationships unfold in four distinct moments of truth. His previous book, The End of Business as Usual, explores the emergence of Generation-C, a new generation of customers and employees and how businesses must adapt to reach them. In 2009, Solis released Engage, which is regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to market, sell and service in the social web.